I had lunch with a company's IT staff yesterday, and asked them, "Which open source projects/products do you use?" They listed off several projects (Tomcat, etc.), but I had to prompt for the most obvious one: "And Linux? I assume you're running Linux?"

"Linux? Oh, of course, I guess we had forgotten that's open source."

This was a hugely telling remark. For this company (and, frankly, for most of the industry), "open source" is short-hand for many things, and sometimes connotes a cutting-edge, not fully baked product. This is accurate in some respects, and wholly inaccurate in others (no one could sanely call Apache, MySQL, etc. "not fully baked").

In this company's mind, Linux is just there. It works, requires no special justification, etc. It just is.

Give JBoss and MySQL a year or two, and they'll be the same. Along with hordes of other open source projects.

For those of you who, like I, have been …

The JAX Innovation Award is intended to honour and recognise the most remarkable and outstanding European contributions in the world of Java and Eclipse. These contributions can include products, open source projects, ideas, concepts, publications, or break-through technological innovations. What's your most favourite innovation or project?

You can submit your proposal online or by downloading and filling out forms provided from this page. The winner can win a 10kEUR prize, which will be presented during the JAX, Enterprise Architecture, and Eclipse Forum Europe …

The organizers of the PHP Québec Conference were gracious enough to give me an unedited copy of my Copyright, Contracts and Licensing for PHP Developers session.

I cleaned the audio up last night, stripping out some of the more odious filler words (I seem to say “Umm” rather often), shortening pauses as I switched slides, removing redundant asides (like asking if there are any questions, when no questions then follow) and excising the introduction and applause.

After a good deal of consideration, I did chose to leave the errors and other flaws in the content presented. These flaws were presented to the audience and they should stay in the recording.

Of course, I don’t want people to be mislead by any of the flaws; to prevent this, I am transcribing the entire talk, …

I was asked a simple question today by a collegue who is an experiened Java Developer and Oracle user and had just installed SUSE on his personal laptop, to align closer with his work environment. What MySQL should I install, the MySQL web site has this and this and this?

Simple question, but the answer isn’t as simple, especially when MySQL now has a number of different products encompassing client functionality in addition to the MySQL server.

Oracle got it right with the latest edition Oracle 10g Express Edition (XE). A simple one rpm install that includes the Oracle Server, Oracle client, a Web Based Administrator, Query Tool and Application Development tool. I guess as we are all experienced, the simple question isn’t something we have a some notes on handy, hence the purpose of my entry …

Recently I've been working on a large-ish project where all of the UI is written in Javascript. That, in itself, is great. The environments (the browsers) are crappy crappy for development though. Sure, there are Firefox extensions etc etc to help, but it's Just Not Great. Javascript = Great. Ajax = Yay. Browsers = Bah.

Over the weekend I spent all sorts of time getting a simple Rails application running with Apache and mod_fcgid. When I gave up and tried making it work with lighttpd I got server error galore. Yay. What was wrong? My fastcgi? The fcgi Ruby extension? My ruby installation is in /pkg/packages/ruby-1.8.4 or some such and the gem tool couldn't find its own libraries after being installed there. Maybe something similar for something else? I have no idea, I got no error messages anywhere. Ruby = Great. Rails = Very nice[1]. Ruby Gems = It sure is no CPAN.pm. FastCGI/lighttpd/etc = Loosely coupled? No mister, you have some way to …

Recently I've been working on a large-ish project where all of the UI is written in Javascript. That, in itself, is great. The environments (the browsers) are crappy crappy for development though. Sure, there are Firefox extensions etc etc to help, but it's Just Not Great. Javascript = Great. Ajax = Yay. Browsers = Bah.

Over the weekend I spent all sorts of time getting a simple Rails application running with Apache and mod_fcgid. When I gave up and tried making it work with lighttpd I got server error galore. Yay. What was wrong? My fastcgi? The fcgi Ruby extension? My ruby installation is in /pkg/packages/ruby-1.8.4 or some such and the gem tool couldn't find its own libraries after being installed there. Maybe something similar for something else? I have no idea, I got no error messages anywhere. Ruby = Great. Rails = Very nice[1]. Ruby Gems = It sure is no CPAN.pm. FastCGI/lighttpd/etc = Loosely coupled? No mister, you have some way to …

As I am writing and publishing more and more blog entries, it becomes important that I have good and reliable backups. I know that if something happens and I cannot recover my entries and comments, I would be terribly upset. So I want to share my process here. Please feel free to share your backup methods by commenting. Hopefully somebody will find it useful.

Backup comprises two parts:

1. File backup

On a Linux machine with Apache, the default web files and directories reside in /var/www/html. Yours may be different. This include all php files and sub-directories like wp-content, wp-include, etc.

The easiest way to do it is to use tar command with -z to compress them. My post here gives you a pointer on tar.

These files are fairly static, so you do not need to back them up …

Today, there seemed to be several interesting news items, so let me elaborate on a couple of them.

Besides the fact that the Mandrake founder Gael Duval isn’t part of Mandriva anymore, the part that interested me was the fact that he was running Mandriva’s Community Department. Their goal was “to improve Mandriva’s image in the open source arena.” Swap Mandriva, with MySQL, and thats me. From engineering grit right up to attending conferences, thats what Community does. Its funny thats what Mandriva chose to close first, seeing their dismal quarter results - basically without an OSS community, you’re nowhere in the OSS world.

I’m a regular lurker on #conary, and reading rPath Creates Malleable, Serviceable Linux Distribution made me …

Apache JMeter is a 100% pure Java desktop application designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. It was originally designed for testing Web Applications but has since expanded to other test functions. Specifically it provides complete support for database testing via JDBC.

Some References: Homepage http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/  ·  Wiki Page  ·  User Manual

Initial Installation Steps

$ su -
$ cd /opt
$ wget http://apache.planetmirror.com.au/dist/jakarta/jmeter/binaries/jakarta-jmeter-2.1.1.tgz
$ wget …

FrOSCon is a two-day conference on free software and open source, which takes place on 24th and 25th June 2006 at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, in St. Augustin near Bonn, Germany.

The Call for Papers ends on March 15th - so you better hurry if you want to give a presentation there! I proposed two MySQL-related talks and also asked some other colleagues to file a few submissions. There is enough stuff happening here to talk about

By the way, their registration frontend is very slick - it's called pentabarf (which I personally think is a weird name) and is powered by Ruby on Rails.